Stella Nyanzi is challenging me in all the ways a self-styled social liberal hates to be challenged. I stumbled across her name in an article where I believe she defended her statements that she would like to... what’s the word... tup Kizza Besigye.

Make the two-backed beast. Tickle his berries. Shake his banana tree. Walk him through her garden of earthly delights. Share some forbidden fruit. Tap his... well, you get the idea.

This was not meant literally – at least I don’t believe so – but let’s just say the lady has quite a way with words and sexual metaphors. Now she is embroiled in a disagreement with Mahmood Mamdani and the sexual metaphors as well as accusations have come up again and I am at a loss to explain why this is uncomfortable.

Sex and politics go hand in hand, they always have. Power may corrupt but it also gets one laid. If a wrinkled old prune like Rupert Murdoch is still attracting far younger women, it’s not because of their low-hanging fruit. There’s other... compensations at play.

And I have always been fine with that: Humans are humans, and politics is politics. Or so I thought. It turns out that I am a prude after all, that I believe there is such a thing as “going too far” in the language we use for public discourse.

All because there is no such thing as escaping a Catholic childhood, no matter how much debauchery one throws at it. This is a horrendously shameful realisation for a columnist to come to, especially in these challenging times.

How do you boil a frog when it is still alive without it jumping out of the pot? By increasing the heat so slowly and steadily the frog never realises it is uncomfortable until it is far too late to save its own life.

I never thought I would miss the good old days of Jay Kay and his cheerful disregard for most of what was said about him during his reign. Laissez-faire has its advantages.

But just before he left, the Cybercrimes Bill became an Act. And this month, the first individual (to my knowledge) has been charged under it for expressing his disdain for John Pombe Magufuli and dismissing any similarities between our Head of State The Fifth and the revered Mwalimu.

To be honest, the opinion this man is being charged for is mild to the point of being boring. The average comment section of any social media outlet is approximately 1,000 per cent more toxic – and that’s on a good day.

Comparatively speaking, Stella Nyanzi’s chosen form of protest is far more incendiary and worthy of consideration. Poor Isaak Habakuk Emily just had the misfortune of being made an example of, because Tanzania is under new management.

The raids on opposition and NGO-led poll tracking stations during the elections were noted. The Machiavellian thing to do was to cut off the supply of information from alternative sources, as the Establishment did rather well.

I happen to agree that there’s no particular reason to believe anyone holds a monopoly on the truth during elections... but I also know that the state has a monopoly on the means of violence. So.

Some of us frogs don’t boil as quietly as others, not if their livelihoods depend on constantly monitoring the temperature of the pot they are in.

It’s been heating up in Dar, slow and steady. Can’t drink during the first Saturday of the month during work hours because we’re apparently conscripted to hard labour. Can’t play pool. Can’t call tell the current president what you think about him unless you’re a fawning little flatterer. With every Thou Cannot the temperature goes up and the totalitarian state creeps a little closer.

I have my doubts as to how much our Head of State is personally invested in the gradual shutdown of freedom of expression. He himself set a bit of an example by being stubbornly opinionated during his election campaigns, to the chagrin of his party.

And since his inauguration, he has shut himself off in State House to work and work and work and work and work some more. Where would he find the time to be personally insulted by anything?

Tanzania is only five presidents into her modernity – any country that has had multiple heads of state will admit that the journey is never smooth.

Retracting freedoms that have already been granted is not an easy thing to do. It will be interesting to see how this administration fares on snatching away liberties that Tanzanians are already used to having.

In the meantime, on a personal note I guess I’ll keep Ms Nyanzi in the forefront, teaching me the limitations of my own opinions.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]